Where the purple people congregate to see the green goats fornicate

Post navigation

Sweden Cared More About Islamophobia Than Saving Elderly in Nursing Homes

House Democrats passed the$3Trillion coronavirus relief bill knowing full well it will not pass in the Senate.

House Democrats passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill on Friday night despite Senate Republicans and President Trump declaring the so-called Heroes Act dead on arrival. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California complained that the 1,800-page bill was “the largest bill in the history of Congress” — and that it was presented this week without a committee hearing. Democrats defended the bill, arguing that Republican foot-dragging forced them to move ahead with a unilateral proposal.

The debate over the Swedish model has been concentrated around whether countries should battle the coronavirus pandemic by locking down everything or adopting the more liberal approach. This debate is as irrelevant to the actual causes of coronavirus deaths as the inhabitants of Constantinople debating whether angels have genders while the Islamic invaders were preparing to breach the city walls.

Preventing teenagers from going to the beach, as many American states and European countries have chosen to do, is going to have a very limited impact on a disease that is killing people in nursing homes.

While Sweden does have a higher rate of virus deaths than Norway or Finland, it’s not because the bars are open. 90% of the dead in Sweden were over 70 and half of them lived in special housing.

Sweden has a higher rate of deaths in care homes than Norway or Finland, and lockdown enthusiasts have struggled to explain why keeping bars open would be killing people in housing for the elderly.

But there is a crucial difference between Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish care homes.

A decade ago, in Sweden, 13% of the workers in care homes were immigrants, while only 5% in Norway and 1% in Finland were. Currently, 28% of care home workers in Sweden are foreigners, but in Stockholm, where the real dying has occurred, 55% of the care home workers are foreign immigrants.

Stockholm has been ground zero for the outbreak with more deaths than the rest of the country combined. And half of those deaths took place in care homes making for a very troubling pattern.

In an interview, Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former Chief Epidemologist and Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), let slip the formerly unspeakable.

Giesecke admitted that Sweden had failed to protect the elderly, and noted that, “many of the people working in nursing homes are from other countries, they’re refugees or asylum seekers.”

The epidemiologist then suggested that many of them might not understand Swedish and may not have been aware of what precautions they should be taking to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

He also noted that Sweden tended to have larger nursing homes than Norway. While he did not say so, in a larger facility, a staff member can potentially spread the virus around to far more residents.

Anders Tegnell, the current state epidemiologist, the Fauci of Sweden, a cult figure whose face appears on everything from smartphone covers to tattoos and caps, dismissed the suggestion that immigrants, who have a much higher rate of coronavirus, could be responsible as, “purely speculative.”

He also insisted that, “we’d best not point fingers” yet for the death toll in Sweden’s nursing homes.

Sweden has a higher death toll than Norway or Finland, but it also has a far higher immigrant population. Finland’s much smaller immigrant population may be one reason why its pandemic never really got off the ground. Not only does Sweden have a larger immigrant population, but it has an especially sizable percentage of an immigrant population that appears most vulnerable to the virus.